DOSbox on Zipit

Who out there has a Zipit? Great, now out of the five of you, who really wants to run Dos on it? Well, for the one or two of you left reading, now you can. The directions can be found here. [Hunter] has worked out a way to get DosBox running on his Zipit. At 315 mhz his old DOS games, like AD&D shown above, are running quite snappily. You can download everything you need to get up and running from the site. If DOS isn’t your thing, you may want to check out the Linux how to as well.

The one thing about actually buying a Zipit, namely the Z2 series pictured, is the fact that Zipit wants you to “activate” your device when you get it with a 1-year commitment at $9.99 a month ($109.99 for their “one year” package) to even use the IM functions on the device. They also include “unlimited texting” with the plan – but seriously, all that is is email to SMS.

Zipit just gets me a touch annoyed at the fact the device requires of all things a frickin’ service plan for a kids toy.

@agent420 On the whole they’ve been pretty free with information and source. ok a couple of things they couldn’t/wouldn’t give out like the blob and wifi driver but for everything else they have either published it or not hindered anyone from working it out. (http://linux.zipitwireless.com)

thanks to information from them and the hardwork of 3 people we now have a choice of at least 3 kernels (.21,.29 and .31) and uboot with everything working including wifi

they could have been better but it’s the nature of the device not the information that has really slowed sales in my opinion

Yes, you can use it without the monthly service fee. I paid 38$ in total for the zipit shown above. You can either flash linux internally or run it off the sd card, but either way there is no need to pay for the service.

I just busted out my zipit2 the other day and was wondering if any people will still hacking on it. Without changing the OS it was trivial to setup a busybox cross compiling system. I could never get direct audio/video working well for me though, I guess I should put openembedded on it.

At the time i installed linux on it, there was no graphical interface, this seems to be fixed by now.

i WAS able to get wifi working under linux, so i imagine it is still possible, I was browsing the web with lynx, going on IRC with bitchx and doing pretty much everything i could do with a (command line) desktop machine.

The only thing I dont know about is sound, but i’ll break the ol’ Z2 out and see what I can do.